Astronomers Detect 'Galactic Space Laser'
upstart writes:
Astronomers detect 'galactic space laser':
A powerful radio-wave laser, called a 'megamaser', has been observed by the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. The record-breaking find is the most distant megamaser of its kind ever detected, at about five billion light years from Earth. The light from the megamaser has traveled 58 thousand billion billion (58 followed by 21 zeros) kilometers to Earth.
[...] The discovery was made by an international team of astronomers led by Dr Marcin Glowacki, who previously worked at the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy and the University of the Western Cape in South Africa.
[...] "This is the first hydroxyl megamaser of its kind to be observed by MeerKAT and the most distant seen by any telescope to date.
[...] The record-breaking object was named 'Nkalakatha' [pronounced ng-kuh-la-kuh-tah] -- an isiZulu word meaning "big boss."
The MeerKAT telescope is a radio telescope comprised of 64 antennas that will make up part of the Square Kilometre Array. Nkalakatha was detected on the first night of an observing run known as LADUMA or "Looking at the Distant Universe with the MeerKAT Array." Megamasers are created during galactic collisions where dense gas regions create hydroxyl (OH) molecules that can coherently radiate energy under the right conditions, just as lasers do, but these emissions are at radiofrequency wavelengths.
Also at SARAO and Rutgers Today.
Journal Reference:
Marcin Glowacki, Jordan D. Collier, Amir Kazemi-Moridani, et al., LADUMA: Discovery of a luminous OH megamaser at z>0.5. The Astrophysical Journal Letters (accepted), 2022. [abstract]
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